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Climate bait and switch: why fossil fuels are 'not essential'
November 26, 2024
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Writing in December's Scientific American, Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes has penned an essay with the title "Fossil Fuels Are Not Essential: The industry argues that we can't live without its deadly products. It is wrong." How so?
She begins with a litany of climate bad news: record high temperatures, floods, and Hurricane Helene. All floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and indeed just about every adverse weather event except maybe blizzards and fog are now recruited as evidence for global warming.
Then she quotes a couple of fossil-fuel companies saying things like, "oil and natural gas remain vital" and that there is a "need for fossil fuels that will continue to play a central role in our lives." That is the bait. We are primed to learn that fossil fuels are, in fact, not essential and that we can live without their "deadly" products.
Apples and oranges
Then comes the switch. Having told us that what these bad-guy corporate fossil-fuel behemoths are saying is wrong, she admits that a transition to renewables will take time, and then accuses them of working for decades to delay it. In one sentence, the topic has changed from whether or not fossil fuels are essential (present tense) to whether fossil-fuel companies have tried to delay "the transition".
Then she spends the rest of her column summarising the story of the gasoline additive tetraethyllead, abstracted from a new book with the heartwarming title Building the Worlds That Kill Us: Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History. From the 1920s until it began to be banned for health reasons in the US in the 1970s, this toxic anti-knock compound was used in making "ethyl" gasoline. Yes, General Motors and the oil companies said in 1925 that adding tetraethyllead to gasoline was "essential" because otherwise, the automobile engines of the time could not have used as high a compression ratio without knocking, leading to poorer fuel efficiency and less power.
Admittedly, their use of the word "essential" was biased by their strong economic motives to shift an externality (a low level of lead poisoning in the entire populace) to the public at large in order to prosper the automotive and oil industries. In 1925, there were 0.17 automobiles per person in the US. One could have argued that autos were not essential in 1925, but they soon came to be, fuelled by that nasty ethyl gasoline.
Except for some regrettable and avoidable industrial accidents, we will never know the specifics of how the widespread levels of lead affected public health in general. If our culture in 1925 had decided the right way, according to Oreskes, refused to consider using tetraethyllead, and sent the engineers back to the drawing board, we probably would have muddled through somehow, but with unknown consequences for both public health and the growth of the automotive industry.
But what of the assertion that fossil fuels are not essential? All we get at the end of her essay is this:
"Leaded gas was not essential to civilization, and neither are fossil fuels. What is essential to civilization is that we dramatically reduce our use of coal, oil and gas — the largest contributors to the existential threat of global climate change — and thereby set our planet on a path toward a safer future."
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For a historian, Oreskes shows a remarkable lack of consciousness regarding the element of time, which is, of course, the only reason the discipline of history exists. She clearly wants us to carry away the message that because the fossil-fuel industry and its allies exaggerated/lied about the essential nature of tetraethyllead in 1925, they are also exaggerating/lying about the essential nature of fossil fuels today. She also wants us to believe that the two cases are parallel enough to validate her rhetorical point.
Tetraethyllead did not make the automotive industry possible, it only improved its efficiency. The world could have done without it. Can the world do without fossil fuels today? Can it do without them in five years, or ten years, or fifty years? I call to the stand Vaclav Smil, an engineer and thinker who has studied the problem extensively and is well-versed in facts on the ground.
Speaking sense
In How the World Really Works, and essays derived from it, Smil agrees that global warming is real, bad things will happen if we do nothing to decrease it, and we ought to start doing something now. So far, he is at one with Oreskes. But in contrast to Oreskes, who I suspect would simply ban or put a prohibitive tax on nearly all fossil fuels tomorrow, Smil's advice as to what we should do right now sounds a little odd. The two most significant things we could do to abate global warming, he thinks, are to change building codes in cold-weather countries so that more insulation is required, and shift the automotive market away from SUVs toward smaller cars. That's it.
Modern civilisation, by which Smil means living in comfortable houses, buying your food instead of killing it, and having a good chance of living to see your grandchildren, is based on four material pillars: cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia (the essential ingredient of fertiliser). There is currently no practical way to make any of these materials at scale without using lots of fossil fuels and emitting carbon thereby. Getting rid of fossil fuels right now means getting rid of cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia. If we quit producing all these things tomorrow, we'd have a disaster, all right: a global depression that would make the one in the 1930s look like a blip.
Consequently, he believes that a realistic path to actually doing something about climate change involves small things like building codes and SUV discouragement now, moving toward renewables as they become economically feasible without punitive government intervention, and mitigating such harm as global warming causes in the future.
Maybe someday, modern civilisation will do without significant amounts of fossil fuels, just as it was hard for the GM engineers in 1925 to imagine making good cars that didn't need ethyl gas. But the facts on the ground are that if we let Oreskes become global energy czar, we would be consigning billions of people to continued poverty rather than allowing them to benefit from the blessings of energy use that people in Cambridge, Massachusetts, enjoy every day. That alone is a reason to favour a more nuanced path than the one that Oreskes tries to get us to believe in by ignoring the passage of time that we will need to get there — which is an odd thing for a historian to do.
What do you think of the fuss over fossil fuels? Comment below.
Karl D. Stephan is a professor of electrical engineering at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. His ebookEthical and Otherwise: Engineering in the Headlines is available in Kindle format and also in the iTunes store.
This article has been republished, with permission, from his blog Engineering Ethics.
Image credit: Pexels
Have your say!
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mrscracker commented 2024-11-26 23:29:01 +1100I guess I missed a part of modern civilization because my food is still killed, not bought.
Except for the fruits and vegetables which are picked.
🙂 -
Michael Cook followed this page 2024-11-26 20:19:22 +1100 -
Andrew Neyman commented 2024-11-26 19:06:27 +1100The review of the article is valuable if true. The headline, which catches the attention, implies that an insight into a question which consumes high value resources from almost everyone in the developed world, can be gained. Yet the article does not fulfil its tempting promise. This is dishonest, and destructive of the trust and co-operative effort (here between writer and reader) that positive and fruitful cultural development requires.
Professor Stephan,and Mercator, would have done better to save us wasted effort and time, by not even engaging with the useless and largely irrelevant arguments of Ms Oreskes.
It is past time that institutions be themselves penalised for publishing and recirculating wasteful rubbish. -
